Movie Music

The producer works with the artist to make a cohesive sounding project from start to finish. In the film world the director works with the actors, ensuring the film is moulded to the directors taste. Would we ever have imagined 3 6 Mafia winning an Oscar?

In the past few years, several hip hop producers have ventured into scoring movies. A movie score is much more difficult then producing a record. Often, the film score follows the actions of the actor.For example, if the actor is involved in a high speed car chase, the music must reflect the suspense within the scene. Film scores rarely repeat the same 4 bars as we see in contemporary music.

Many hip hop artists have sampled Scarface but many forget that it was Giorgio Moroder who scored the film. Before Scarface, Moroder was a record producer, who was/is widely regarded as a great influence on house and electronic music. His syntheziser based records would go on to influence Daft Punk – who in 2010 went on to score Tron: Legacy.

In 1999, Rza scored the Jim Jarmusch directed Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which starred Forest Whitaker. Rza would go on to provide the scores for the blockbuster films Kill Bill and Kill Bill 2.

In 2003, DJ Quik collaborated with Marcus Miller to score the film Head of State, directed & starring Chris Rock.

Then we have producers who plied their trade in movie scores, who would later collaborate with hip hop producers to make albums. Jon Brion was an integral part behind Kanye West’s 2nd album Late Registration. Camara Kambon was a keyboardist for Dr Dre, but previously he had composed multiple documentaries for HBO & PBS, such as Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life & Death of a Champion. He would become the youngest composer to ever recieve an Emmy Award.

More recently, I was heavily impressed with the Despicable Me score, which happened to be composed by Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes. Not only was the film score great but the OST to the film was as good as many albums out at the time.